A FORUM FOR ART AS SOCIAL PRACTICE AND PARTICIPATORY ART; COMMENTS ARE OPEN.READINGS REFER TO "LIVING AS FORM: SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART FROM 1991-2011"

11/14/08

Airwaves

I think that our first collaborative project was a major success. I loved that we were able to get such a variety of people involved. Also that the variety of people who were involved really seemed to enjoy themselves. I think that this just re-emphasizes why I love art and why I so look forward to being an art educator and will be able to get people involved in art on a daily basis. One of my initial worries was that having mostly art students participate that they would not follow the directions or purposefully draw an extensive line drawing not based on the music, or just do something out of the ordinary because they could. First, I found that letting go of the rules worked out much to our benefit. Letting go of some control and truly letting people express themselves i whatever way made sense to them clearly benefited our art work. Second, I found that most of the art students were very willing participants eager to help out, not looking to make a point. I was very impressed with everyones professionalism and willingness to participate.

One aspect of the project that I had not anticipated was the having to sell people to come do our project. I guess I almost forgot that there is ALWAYS something on the walls of CCA+D so people (students mostly) didn't exactly stop to look and see what the spectacle was. We were forced to stop people and ask them to participate. This was not my favorite part of the project, as I am not a very good saleswoman, but definitely with Farolyn and the rest of the class, we had many more participants than I had originally expected.

A few small details I would have changed would have been to only use CD players (and have more of them available) with the one track, that seemed to work best, and made the directions eve more simple; along the lines of press play and go. Also I maybe would have done it for a slightly shorter time, by the time 3pm rolled around we were starting to see the same people come and go, and it seemed as though the people who didn't want to participate felt a little uncomfortable.

The overall look of the two pieces is what astounds me. I'm not really sure what I expected, I guess something along the line of simple children scribbles or outsider art maybe. And about halfway through it definitely did have that effect. However, because we had so many layers and layers of lines and variety of lines each of the works definitely became a piece of its own and transcended into something with more depth and meaning than scribbles on the page. I am very happy with the outcome of the work and very excited to see where this idea could go next!